Tips & Tricks for Storing Recycled Electronic Components

Early on in his lifelong obsession with electronics, David ran into the problem of storing all of his components.

Readers of my previous articles will recall that I am somewhat of a hoarder. I have lots of electronic components lying around, some of which I purchased, but many of which I stripped from old PCBs. (See Stripping PCBs to Reclaim Parts).

Very early on in my lifelong obsession with electronics, I ran into the problem of "Where do you put it all?" Along the way, I have come up with several ideas on how to store all my bits and pieces in a way that would allow me to rapidly find something I wanted for a project.

My first attempt at this, in the early 70s when I was still in my teens, involved making a miniature "Chest of Drawers" out of matchboxes. The matchboxes in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where I lived at that time were made of very thin wood and were surprisingly sturdy. The "drawers" themselves were only made of card, but the wooden outer case protected them very well and they lasted a long time. I'd make my "chests" by gluing together an array of matchboxes six across by five deep -- giving 30 compartments -- which could store one decade of resistors in E24 values plus presets, etc. I would wrap the whole thing in paper and paint it colour-coded for that decade of resistance (brown, red, orange, yellow...).

Other chests were used for small capacitors and transistors and integrated circuits. The fact that both my parents -- and a lot of their friends -- were smokers who saved their empty matchboxes for me helped me rapidly create storage for all the small components I amassed. The match company later converted to all-cardboard matchboxes that were almost useless for this purpose. Alas, I threw out my last dilapidated matchbox chest some years ago, so I have no picture to show you.

In the meantime, I had grown up some, and so had the world. Plastics technology had advanced and begun to make the ubiquitous plastic storage boxes that you now find in all shapes and sizes in $2 shops and elsewhere. On a work trip to Johannesburg in South Africa, in the local OK Bazaars department store, I found the boxes shown below.

The nice thing about these was that they would hold new resistors with full length leads -- something that my matchboxes could not do. Of course, that wasn't a problem when I was scrounging resistors from old PCBs, but the fact that I was now working and could afford to buy new resistors with full-length leads caused me some heartache until the plastic boxes came along. Unfortunately, they had only five compartments in each box. This meant it was not possible to store a full decade of resistor values in a box, but I got round that by storing one value and its decade multiples (e.g., 10Ω, 100Ω, 1KΩ, 10KΩ, and 100KΩ) in one box.

With my matchboxes, I had discovered that the boxes for the E24 resistor values that were not in the E12 series were very sparsely populated, or empty, so I used only E12 values. Thus, I ended up with 12 boxes for resistors 10Ω to 820KΩ, along with a few more for values outside this range.

They were also useful for other things, such as 7805/7905/7812/7912 and "other" voltage regulators, and for small nuts and bolts and screws. I found the OK Bazaars only kept a few boxes at any time, so I nipped round to them every time I was in Johannesburg and cleaned them out. In this way, I managed to acquire enough boxes to store most of my bits, alongside my matchbox drawers, which were beginning to show their age. I still store my resistors in these boxes to this day (note the antique Dymo-tape labels on the front of the box in the image above).

One of my friends was married to a theatre nurse. One day she happened to come home with a plastic box that was used for sutures. When I remarked on it, she said she could get me lots of them, and she did. They proved useful for larger power transistors and other components like audio and RF plugs and sockets, etc., as illustrated below:

For larger parts, larger boxes were required. A company in Zimbabwe sold these boxes pretty cheaply. They came with a foldable three-way divider and a pre-printed "Back / Centre/ Front" legend on the box. These were ideal for storing larger capacitors and other components that would not fit into matchboxes or the plastic "fishing tackle/sewing" boxes. I brought a few of these to Australia from Zimbabwe, but they are also a bit dilapidated now.

I also discovered Ziploc bags. These were not readily available in Zimbabwe, but many imported things came with them and I picked up all I could find. Later, I discovered that the local banks used them for holding coins, and I managed to scrounge some off a friendly lady at my bank. Now I get them for a few dollars per hundred on eBay.

Does anyone know how to paste a pic or link to an image on your own Hard drive reliably?

I don't believe you can link to a pictire on your hard drive. I copy the picture to my public folder on my dropbox account, right click the file to "get the public URL" and then paste this into the dialog .

In previous iterations of UBM forums, (MCC, SJ, CE) it was poosible to send the message to the editor and he would put it somewhere on the UBM server and give you the URL. A little indirect and it was not immediate. i am sure Max would oblige.

I tried that and it worked with a pic from the internet. Many thanks! Then I tried to paste or link to a pic from my computer (that I had open in Paint or stored as a .jpg on my hard drive) with no joy and eventually my post got corrupted and almost unreadable so I deleted it.

I have pasted pics in the past but it has only worked for me once or twise, and I am not sure what does or does not make it work.

Does anyone know how to paste a pic or link to an image on your own Hard drive reliably?

@TonyTib - I always felt kind of silly putting a big label over the top of my plastic boxes (photo 2 on page 2) because as you say the beauty is that you can see what's inside. So I only do this when the contents are ICs or something which all look the same - otherwise I use 6mm printed labels which only take a small part of the lid so you can still see inside.

The pill boxes (photo 3 on page 2) are not very high quality and are not clear, so you need to label them as shown. And you have to stick them together to avoid getting infuriated by rows falling out, However they do click closed well and are a very compact way to store small components so I tolerate them. If you really can't find them in the States l could send you a few - all the discount shops seem to have them here. You could then buy me a beer at EELive 2015 :-)

Your recommended boses look good - like me you seem to go for the postive latches to keep them closed. $2 is a nice price for a good box.